A Rain Day

After a week of warm sunshine, the weather changed  - broke - last night with torrential rain showers and then an evening of showers and mists and drizzles.  When I got up this morning I couldn't see the valley at all, the far hills were hidden behind a curtain of white mist.  Everything is dripping and wet this morning.  But we needed it; the water butt was down to 30% full and the ground was parched.  (With a gentle pattering roar the rain starts again.) We have been planting vegetable/salad crops; tomatoes, peppers, courgettes, chard, rocket, basil, mixed salad leaves.  The shallots are doing well and will appreciate the rain.   Paul and I were due to go onto the hill this afternoon to chop wood for the winter, but I don't know if that will happen in this rain.  

The 6am Garden

One cloudless day has led to another and then another.  The forecast is for this pattern to fade and for more unsettled weather towards the end of the week, with rain over the weekend.  We need it, and local farmers too are anxious.  We have had no rain for about three weeks but the old lane alongside the house, overgrown with ferns, grasses and wild flowers, is heavy with dew all the time.  Weather 'patterns' are a beautiful, poetic idea; I love the idea of the weather being 'unsettled' too, as if something so vast, so indifferent, could be uncertain or indecisive.  

We managed to have a couple of hours in the garden last night, planting basil and salads, getting in the last of the tomatoes and peppers.  A beautiful warm evening, an explosion of purples and deep pinks in the sunset over the Radnor Forest.  

I was up early this morning and took a walk around the garden.  Lots of swallows over the church, collared doves calling somewhere, the hedges alive with birds.   Yesterday there was a troop of swifts screaming around the church and over the lower village first thing in the morning; I watched their shadows on the old stone wall.  Swifts feed at different places at different times of the day, following the insects.  We see them here in the evening and the early morning, if we are up early enough.  

Still no sign of the camera - but I will find pictures soon!

A Cloudless Day in June

The first of June and the first entry in my final seasonal journal.  A beautiful day, cloudless, hot, sunny.  We had a shapeless and uneven spring, with cold days and sunny days and frosts quite late.  Summer seems to have arrived slowly, and the warm sunny weather is here in patches, three days here and three days there, and is not supposed to last beyond Wednesday.  But I love the sunshine and will enjoy it while I can.  

Summer is a strange season, possibly the strangest of all.  I find it's richness and fecundity hides darknesses and wet gloom, like the legend of the Green Man.  It also seems the season most full of nostalgia and memory, perhaps because in this country warm summers seem infrequent - but will this change with global warming?  There is also the association with holidays, another source of memory and nostalgia.  But I will also be writing about the garden and the birds - the village is full of swifts in the early evening - and summer journeys here, as well as summers past and urban memories of hot summers in hard cities.  

This morning we drove home the long way and went along the valley to New Radnor, where we turned back on ourselves and turned off at Kinnerton.  A tiny, sleepy village, old walls erupting in wildflowers, a village full of birdsong.  We took the narrow road past Four Stones, one of the many prehistoric sites in the Radnor Valley, and didn't see another car on the road.  Deep ditches full of cow parsley, buttercups and a rampant purple flower I can't identify.  A lovely route, silent and empty and dusty, like a road into the past.